Chapter 37

Carl's assassination plan for the fairy Astrid goes catastrophically wrong when Samantha accidentally releases a level-225 demon from the Nothing into the casino, forcing Katia to improvise. Despite the chaos, Katia uses her deck's totems to corner and kill Astrid in the kitchen, though Carl discovers the shocking revelation that Astrid is married to the Night Wyrm and has children.

Carl finishes setting up explosives in the secret hallway to ambush Astrid, positioning claymores aimed at the closet she uses to enter the middle floor. He stations Katia in the women's bathroom and instructs Samantha to cause a disturbance in the bar to force the guards to summon Astrid. However, Samantha becomes intoxicated and inadvertently enters the casino, where she breaches an entrance to the Nothing, releasing a level-225 minor feral demon named Minge—a grotesque, corpulent creature with twenty spindly arms covered in claws. When an alarm sounds, Carl realizes the plan has failed because Astrid takes the main stairs instead of the secret passage. Emir Akbas, a drunk Ghazi crawler, attacks Carl on the dance floor before being restrained by his companion Zeynep. As the demon rampages through the restaurant, killing numerous guards and NPCs, Carl crosses into the kitchen where he finds Astrid directing remaining guards. Astrid reveals she released creatures called "vorpals" to combat the demon and that she has a husband named Hamed, known as the Night Wyrm. Katia arrives invisible and uses her deck's totems—a strength-buffed troll and a skull-faced crow—to pin Astrid. Carl rips off the fairy's wings, and the crow removes her eyes before a spike through her head kills her. As Katia's totems leave the kitchen, they deliberately appear monstrous to mislead the NPCs into thinking the fairy was killed by a creature rather than crawlers. Astrid's dying words—"I was almost done. I would be free soon"—trouble Carl as he flees with Katia.